Community Infrastructure for Building and Coupling Models

ESMF Website Transition

Welcome to the new ESMF website! While all of the familiar content from the old website is here, it is organized differently. The following links show where key content is located. If you cannot find an item, please contact esmf_support@list.woc.noaa.gov.

The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) collaboration is high-performance, flexible software infrastructure for building and coupling weather, climate, and related Earth science applications. The ESMF defines an architecture for composing complex, coupled modeling systems and includes data structures and utilities for developing individual models.

The basic idea behind ESMF is that complicated applications should be broken up into coherent pieces, or components, with standard calling interfaces. In ESMF, a component may be a physical domain, or a function such as a coupler or I/O system. ESMF also includes toolkits for building components and applications, such as regridding software, calendar management, logging and error handling, and parallel communications.

The National Unified Operational Prediction Capability (NUOPC) and its research partners are working toward a common model architecture - a standard way of building models. The NUOPC Layer defines conventions and templates for using ESMF, and makes it simpler to adopt the framework. Learn more about the NUOPC Layer.

Grid Remapping

RegridWeightGen: ESMF has the option to build a standalone application that can generate interpolation weights in parallel. It's fast and can handle a wide variety of grids and grid options. It's not necessary to use the rest of ESMF to use it ... just provide grid files in a standard (netCDF-based) format.

Regridding Status: ESMF's regridding capability is growing with every release. See the latest.